Challenge
The product team was three sprints behind on a card-issuing feature that several enterprise contracts depended on. London engineering salaries had pushed a single mid-to-senior full-stack hire past £85,000 plus on-costs, and the two roles they did fill took roughly five months each through agencies charging 20% to 25% fees. Contractors were available but IR35 exposure made the finance team nervous, and every week of delay risked a missed go-live with a banking partner. Hiring four people that way was simply not realistic on the timeline or the budget.
OSCABE approach
OSCABE stood up a Managed Remote Team: four engineers and a tech lead drawn from our Bangalore and Pune talent pool, all through our 5-stage vetting (work-sample build, system-design interview, code review, communication screen and reference checks). The pod sat under one UK contract, IR35-friendly, with the professionals keeping the majority of the fee and the OSCABE margin shown transparently. We aligned them to a 4 to 6 hour daily overlap with London, so standups, pairing and PR reviews happened live rather than over a 24-hour lag. First engineers were matched within our usual 72-hour window and the full pod was productive inside about six weeks.
Outcome
The card-issuing feature shipped roughly a sprint ahead of the renegotiated date, and the pod has since owned the ledger and reconciliation services outright. The client estimates a saving of around £420,000 a year against the equivalent London in-house team once recruiter fees, on-costs and desk space are included, while keeping velocity comparable to their internal squad. Two of the pod members have since been promoted to own service areas, and the company has asked us to add a fifth engineer for their mobile SDK. Attrition across the pod has been nil over the first year.
Inside the engagement
The full evidence: team, timeline, stack, vetting, security, costs and before/after metrics.
The problem
The client, a London-based Series B payments fintech, had raised on a roadmap that assumed a fully staffed product squad. In reality their hiring pipeline had stalled. Senior React and Node.js roles had been open for the better part of a year, and a card-issuing feature that three enterprise contracts depended on was three sprints behind. A go-live with a regulated banking partner was at risk, and every slipped week pushed that date further out. The finance team had ruled out day-rate contractors because of IR35 exposure, and the agency route was both slow (around five months per hire) and expensive (20 to 25 per cent fees). They did not need one more individual hire. They needed a working delivery team in weeks.
Team composition
OSCABE assembled a five-person managed pod, sized to ship a regulated payments feature without disrupting the client's existing squad:
- 1 tech lead (12 yrs, payments and ledger systems, ran architecture and PR sign-off)
- 2 senior full-stack engineers (one 9 yrs React-leaning, one 8 yrs Node.js-leaning)
- 1 mid-senior Node.js engineer (6 yrs, services and integrations)
- 1 QA automation engineer (5 yrs, Cypress and Playwright)
All five worked a 4 to 6 hour daily overlap with London so standups, pairing and reviews happened live rather than across a 24-hour lag.
Timeline
The engagement reached full productivity inside six weeks:
- Weeks 1 to 2: tech lead and first two engineers matched and onboarded; environment access, codebase walkthrough, ledger domain handover.
- Weeks 3 to 4: remaining engineers and QA live; card-issuing service mapped, test harness stood up, first feature slices in review.
- Weeks 5 to 6: full pod at sprint velocity, owning the card-issuing workstream end to end and feeding into the banking-partner integration.
Tech stack
React with TypeScript and Next.js on the front end; Node.js with NestJS and PostgreSQL for ledger and reconciliation services; Redis for queues; everything containerised with Docker and orchestrated on AWS (ECS, RDS, SQS). CI ran on GitHub Actions with automated test gates and trunk-based deploys.
How OSCABE vetted the team
Every pod member cleared OSCABE's five-step vetting before being put forward. An instant AI shortlist narrowed the pool against the role brief; a senior OSCABE engineering specialist then ran a technical interview with a live coding and system-design test focused on payments and ledger correctness; a structured communication assessment confirmed they could hold a live London standup and write clear PR descriptions; background and reference checks validated history and prior delivery; and because these were engineering roles, we ran Chartered Engineer / CE verification on the senior members. Only candidates who passed all five stages reached the client.
What was delivered
The card-issuing feature shipped roughly a sprint ahead of the renegotiated date and made the banking-partner go-live. The pod then took ownership of the ledger and reconciliation services outright, including double-entry posting, settlement reconciliation and an audit-friendly transaction history. Test coverage on the payments paths rose from patchy to comprehensive, and two pod members were later promoted to own service areas.
Client workflow and collaboration
The pod operated as part of the client's engineering organisation, not an arms-length vendor. They joined the client's daily standup, worked the same Jira board and sprint cadence, and raised pull requests into the client's repositories for review by both their own tech lead and the client's staff engineers. Fortnightly planning and a weekly delivery check-in with the client's VP of Engineering kept priorities aligned.
Tools used
Jira and Confluence for planning and docs; GitHub for source and code review; Slack for daily comms; Figma for design handover; Linear-style sprint boards mirrored into Jira; Datadog for observability; and 1Password plus the client's SSO for credential management.
Security and compliance model
The engagement ran under ISO 27001-aligned controls and UK GDPR. Engineers accessed systems through the client's SSO with least-privilege, role-scoped permissions, on managed devices with disk encryption and screen-lock policies. No production cardholder data left the client's environment; test data was synthetic. Cross-border data flows were covered by the UK IDTA with a documented transfer risk assessment. Every pod member signed an NDA, and all work product and IP assigned to the client.
Cost comparison
| Item | London in-house (5 roles) | OSCABE managed pod |
|---|---|---|
| Base salaries plus on-costs | around GBP 560,000 | included |
| Recruiter fees (one-off, annualised) | around GBP 90,000 | none |
| Desk, equipment, overheads | around GBP 40,000 | none |
| Annual cost | around GBP 690,000 | around GBP 270,000 |
| Net annual saving | around GBP 420,000 |
Before and after
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Senior roles open | 4 (about 11 months) | 0 |
| Card-issuing delivery | 3 sprints behind | shipped a sprint early |
| Annual delivery cost (5 roles) | around GBP 690,000 | around GBP 270,000 |
| Pod attrition (year 1) | n/a | nil |
| Payments test coverage | patchy | comprehensive |
What OSCABE managed vs what the client managed
OSCABE managed:
- Sourcing, five-step vetting, employment, payroll and the single UK contract.
- Day-to-day pod management, performance, retention and overlap discipline.
- Managed devices, access tooling and the security and compliance baseline.
The client managed:
- Product priorities, roadmap and sprint goals.
- Technical direction and acceptance of work through their own reviewers.
- Production deploys and the banking-partner relationship.
Why remote worked
A 4 to 6 hour live overlap meant the pod was effectively in the room for the parts that mattered: standups, pairing on the trickier ledger logic, and same-day PR review. Payments work rewards careful, well-reviewed code over raw hours, and the pod's seniority plus a tech lead who owned sign-off gave the client confidence without a 24-hour feedback loop. One UK contract, IR35-friendly and fully managed, removed the friction that had made contractors a non-starter.
“We had been trying to hire these roles for the better part of a year. OSCABE gave us a working, vetted team inside six weeks, on one UK contract, and they genuinely feel like part of our engineering org rather than an outsourced shop.”